Women rulers generally get a bad press. There is Athaliah, Queen of Judah, who had all of her husband’s family executed in order to seize sole power. Irina, the only ruling Byzantine empress (797-802), blinded her own son. China also had one reigning empress, Wu Zetian (690-705). She expanded the Chinese Empire but is said to have killed two of her children, among other atrocities. Historians of China are especially prone to attribute any evil actions that occur during a reign to powerful women: witness the demonization both of Chiang Kai-Shek’s wife Soong Mei-Ling and Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. Not that the stereotypes were necessarily without truth — in these patriarchal empires, a woman probably had to be twice as ruthless and cruel as a man if she were to obtain and keep power.
The last “dragon lady” to rule China died a century ago, but historians still cannot decide if she was a villain or a heroine, or (more likely) something in between. Cixi, the Dowager Empress, entered the Forbidden City as a 16-year-old semi-literate concubine in 1851. When her husband died in 1861, she seized power with the help of the (childless) official empress Zhun, and held it for 47 years. Her own son, Tongzhi, was 5 at the time. He died at 19 in 1875, and Cixi appointed her 3-year-old nephew Guangxu. Cixi was suspected of engineering Tongzhi’s death, and certainly poisoned Guangxu a few days before her own death in 1908.
Jung Chang, whose Wild Swans, about the lives of her grandmother and mother, is probably the most widely read Chinese memoir in the West, has now published a new biography, Empress Dowager Cixi: the Concubine who Launched Modern China. As the title makes clear, Chang comes down strongly on the heroine side. She does this by attributing very nearly every good thing that happened in China during this long reign to Cixi, and the many bad things to other people. Giving Cixi such unmixed credit requires Chang to downplay the efforts of those around her. This book is probably the only account of 19th century China in which Li Hongzhang (called “China’s Bismarck” by admiring Europeans) gets only a few passing mentions.
Chang’s last book was a massive biography of Mao, written with her husband Jon Halliday. The Columbia China expert Andrew Nathan aroused a storm when he accused Chang and Halliday (in The London Review of Books) of “[failing] to give readers any information to help them to evaluate their sources’ reliability … It is clear that many of Chang and Halliday’s claims are based on distorted, misleading or far-fetched use of evidence.”
Chang is not a trained historian, but she has clearly done a great deal of research for both of these biographies. Nevertheless these works are not history, and they serve as an interesting object lesson in what responsible history (as opposed to popularization) requires. Why aren’t they history? They certainly look like history, with huge bibliographies and lots of footnotes. Though I am not a trained historian myself, I would venture two rules. First, research done with the aim of proving a pre-existing thesis must inevitably give distorted results. Secondly, fairness both to the reader and to other historians requires some discussion of competing interpretations and their basis in the evidence. This second rule is, I think, especially important in a work written for a general audience that may not have the background to evaluate evidence for themselves.
Chang violates both of these rules. In her view, Cixi was an open-minded, tolerant, foward-looking ruler who desired only the prosperity and independence of China. She was adored by her people, even by the two brothers-in-law whose power she usurped. (They could not have succeeded to the throne, but would have been the natural regents). I was curious to see how Chang would handle the events of 1898, and the subsequent Boxer Rebellion. In 1898, two reformers, Kang Youwei and Liang Qiqiang, attempted to gain the ear of the young emperor Guangxu and institute some sort of constitutional monarchy. The coup ended with the flight of the reformers, and the imprisonment of Guangxu until his murder in 1908. Chang handles this by demonzing Kang Youwei, generally regarded as a brilliant (if erratic and egocentric) thinker. She notes that his enemies gave him the nickname “Wild Fox,” and thereafter refers to him only as “Wild Fox Kang,” or “The Wild Fox.” It is rather as if an anti-Obama historian should note that his enemies called him a socialist, and thereafter refer only to “Socialist Obama,” or “The Socialist.” If any of Kang Youwei’s heirs are still alive, they should sue for libel.
In the case of the Boxer Rebellion, Chang has to admit that Cixi’s support of the rebels, based partly on her superstitious belief in their claims to be impervious to bullets, was disastrous for China. But, says Chang, Cixi admitted her faults and thereafter tried her best to return to the modernization program and win western hearts. (She also implied she was sorry for dumping Guangxu’s favorite concubine in a well as she fled the Forbidden City — tourists are still shown the well).
At first it might seem that Chang was motivated by the common desire among feminist writers to rescue maligned or neglected women from the ashcan of history. But I think her view of Cixi arises from more personal, and political aims. In both Wild Swans and her Mao biography she makes clear her (quite understandable) bitterness toward the Chinese Communist regime, and her unwillingness to allow even the slightest benefit to China from the twentieth century revolutions. In this book she has nothing good to say even about Sun Yat-Sen, a remarkable stance for a Chinese historian. On the other hand, she is uncommonly ready to forgive westerners for their part in China’s sufferings, and to point out (sometimes justly) overlooked mercies such as the United States’ dedication of its Boxer indeminities to finance Chinese education abroad. (Of course, she attributes such successes to Cixi’s artful diplomacy). She sees Chiang Kai-Shek as the true heir to Cixi, another conclusion that would certainly surprise most readers (although Chiang, like Cixi, is now receiving a second look even in Mainland China).
None of this keeps the story from being gripping. Chang is a good writer, and how could the story of this 16-year-old concubine and her rise to power not be fascinating? She is a woman who grew and learned throughout her life, and unlike Irina or Wu Zetian, she is close enough to our own time that we can know something of her psychology, her daily habits, her clothes and pets and gardens.
It is only a pity that polemic popular history of this sort must inevitably steamroll genuinely inquisitive study of the evidence. Many more people will read Jung Chang’s book than will read “real history.” Soon her interpretation will become something “everyone knows,” just as “everyone knows” that Richard III was innocent of his nephews’ murder because Josephine Tey said so; and “everyone knows” that Philippe Aries proved that medieval people did not understand a child was different from an adult.
It is a pity because reality is so much more complex and, yes, more interesting. But I suppose it’s better for readers to know something about history than nothing. There is always the chance that their curiosity will be awakened, that they’ll try to learn more.
